SANTA CRUZ – Late rains finally brought a cornucopia of mushrooms bursting from the soil, just in time for the 45th annual Fungus Fair.

Mushroom enthusiasts crowded the Louden Nelson Community Center on Friday and Saturday to see a rainbow of local fungi made up of about 200 species displayed in forest dioramas, attend talks and cooking demonstrations, make mushroom arts and crafts and taste foraged fare.

Mushroom-inspired artwork lined the hallway leading to vendors of mushroom-themed products, such as grow-your-own starter kits, mushroom-dyed clothing, books and a wide variety of fresh, dried, gourmet and medicinal mushrooms.

Bob Russo and daughter Saffron came to check out the displays, hear talks on medicinal mushrooms and maybe bring home a starter kit.

“I like all the different ways that people get into mushrooms,” Russo said. “Some people go and collect them, some people sell things, some people like the cooking aspects of it, and there’s such an amazing wealth of species and I know so little about them, so every time I come I learn something new.”

“I like looking at all the different colors,” said Saffron.

The Fungus Fair is the annual fundraiser and membership drive for the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz, a club dedicated to studying and sharing the appreciation of wild mushrooms with monthly meetings, culinary events and local and long-distance forays. Around 3,000 are expected to attend the three-day event, which continues Sunday.

“We’re a food and wine club with a mushroom problem,” said Les Seltzer, co-coordinator of the fair.

Sean Hinson, a member of the Fungus Federation and botany student in San Jose who is “interested in growing plants in space,” said he realized that he couldn’t study plants without also understanding their relationships with mushrooms.

“That began my fascination with mushrooms, and the fact that most people don’t know anything about them makes learning about them way cooler,” he said. “You gotta go against the grain, right?”

Hinson learned that fungi aren’t just associated with death and decay, but that in fact mycorrhizal networks in the soil (the main “body” of the fungi) form symbiotic relationships with plants, exchanging water and nutrients and promoting healthy ecosystems.

“The deeper and deeper you go the more interesting it gets, and then you get into communities like this where you can email pretty much any mycologist and they’re always friendly, it’s a community that’s always been really open,” he said.

Christian Schwarz, minister of science for the Fungus Federation, has gone deeper than most mushroom enthusiasts. He has been collecting and photographing the biodiversity of fungi in the region for over a decade and published, along with co-author Noah Siegel, the seminal guidebook “Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast.”

“I really like the idea of putting faces to these names from the past,” said Schwarz. “We get this accumulated, inherited knowledge that’s kind of mysterious and hard to work with, but then when you start putting photos to it the picture becomes clearer overall.”

With a $15,000 grant from the Fungus Federation, Schwarz has been able to sequence the DNA of about 750 of the most interesting species he’s found.

“We’ve found new species, species that were not known to occur in this part of the world, well known species that had never been sequenced, species that had been sequenced but not photographed,” he said.

Schwarz and Siegel gave several talks throughout the weekend, signed books and identified specimens that visitors brought in.

“Some of the stuff that people bring in is really interesting, and we don’t have records of them,” Schwarz said. “We’re going to be taking some of these back for sequencing. Our whole project has depended on people who are not professionals, who are just excited and interested, and they bring in stuff that we’ve never seen. So because we have this huge network of eyes and ears, we have a much deeper, richer picture of what lives here.”

IF YOU GO:

What: 45st Annual Fungus Fair.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Where: Louden Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz.

Tickets: $10 general admission, $5 students and seniors 60 and older, free for kids 12 and younger.